Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

Another Go at Language Design

Rob Pike
Google, Inc

About the talk:

A while back, it seemed that type-driven object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java had taken over. They still dominate education. Yet the last few years have seen a number of different languages reach prominence, often of very different styles: Python, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, Lua, and many more. Surely there are enough languages. Yet new ones keep appearing. Why? And why now? In this talk I will explain some possible reasons and why they led us to define yet another language, Go.

Rob Pike is a Principal Engineer at Google, Inc. He works on distributed systems, data mining, programming languages, and software development tools. Before Google, Rob was a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that developed Unix. While there, he worked on computer graphics, user interfaces, languages, concurrent programming, and distributed systems. He was an architect of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and is the co-author with Brian Kernighan of The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. Other details of his life appear on line but vary in veracity.